In the third trimester of my first pregnancy, my husband left on a six-week business trip. A week before, we’d moved from New York City to a fixer-upper about sixty miles up the Hudson. Alone in unfamiliar territory, literally and figuratively, I took breaks from my nesting impulse-induced sanding and painting to shop online for baby gear. Compared to my house, creaking and sputtering around me, the computer was smooth and shiny and, thanks to a high-speed connection, full of easy answers to difficult questions.
It started out simply enough: searching for reviews of infant car seats, I discovered an Internet forum where parents gathered to rate and discuss baby gear. I’d never entered the realm of screen names and avatars (tiny pictures forum members use to represent themselves online), and I found it a little hard at first to glean information from the forum members’ postings. I was a fast learner, though, and I picked up the netspeak abbreviations and began to get a feel for online conversations. I had no desire ever to take part in one myself, I was just looking for diaper bag recommendations.
What I found instead was the freak-world of diaper-bag aficionados. It had never occurred to me (I’m not a purse person) that there were designer diaper bags, or that some women would want dozens of them, spending countless hours and dollars buying, selling, and trading them online. Some of these mommies even felt the need to hide their purchases from the presumably disapproving daddies. O brave new world, where modern technology meets old-fashioned gender stereotypes!
Packages arrived daily on our front porch—a car seat, a stroller, a crib and, yes, a diaper bag—making the UPS man my closest human contact. He was cute in those brown shorts, but I was relieved when at last my husband returned. Our daughter was born, serene and sweet as a peach. All of a sudden, Internet bargain hunting seemed a lot less interesting. I continued to shop for nursery items online but I didn’t linger or lurk on web forums.
Just after my daughter’s first birthday, I met an energetic woman at our parent/child music class who invited me to join her e-mail group. The group had started with a small circle of new moms eager to set up play dates and was beginning to mutate into an online parenting forum. This group had something the other e-groups I’d stumbled upon lacked: a geographical home base. All of the moms (and the few dads) on the list were local. Suddenly my cold, heartless computer was sending me messages from potential real-life friends. I was hooked.
I bravely posted my first message to the group, recommending a local shoe store. Soon, I was posting wordy, nerdy replies on a variety of topics. I enjoyed the challenge of articulating my developing parenting philosophy. I typed in full, grammatical, carefully spell-checked sentences. I avoided the temptation to LOL (that's laugh out loud) at another post, to pipe in that I'd BTDT (been there, done that), or to refer to my family members as DH (dear husband) and DD (dear daughter).
Through my daughter’s second year and my second pregnancy, I weighed in on night weaning, introduction of solid foods, Lyme Disease prevention, the use/misuse/overuse of antibiotics, and the insidiousness of growth charts. I heartily recommended my pediatrician and midwife. I went on way too much about my reasons for keeping my child TV-free. I shared the scary story of my daughter locking herself in the car, with the keys inside, on a ninety-degree day. I bitched about a nasty flight attendant who berated me—hugely pregnant and traveling without my husband—for changing my daughter into her pajamas at our seats (in the dark, while the movie played) instead of in the lavatory. At last I was interacting with my local peer group—albeit from the comfort of my desk, often in my pajamas, always alone.
In real life, the two friends I had made since leaving the city moved away, taking with them my daughter’s only playmates and my entire social life. To make their departures even more tragic, both had recently had second children: the never-to-be playmates to my own soon-to-be second child.
The e-mail list, now a full-fledged forum, moved to a fancier Web host and grew exponentially. My son was born, and my husband continued to travel for his job. Desperate to meet people, I took part in as many forum-endorsed events and outings as possible: play groups, hikes, meal exchanges, La Leche League meetings, fairs and festivals, sales and fundraisers.
I did my best to make friends, but I found it depressingly difficult to connect with any of the attractive, smart, talented women I met at these functions. Many of them knew each other already, and their kids had all picked their best-friends-for-life from among their coterie. Those with only infants didn’t seem to want toddling siblings at their play groups, and I had difficulty finding two-kid families with the same age span as mine. The mathematics and chemistry required to forge new friendships were becoming too complicated, even for a geek like me.
The conversations I struck up with these nice people always had the same I-love-being-a-mom blandness, tempered with occasional gee-this-job-sucks sarcasm. It was hard to figure out if we had anything in common, aside from the fact that we all had young children. Once, when the subject of our pre-kid careers came up, another mom told me that she assumed from the tone of my posts that I was a lawyer. I was an actress. Sure, I had often been criticized by my drama school professors for being "too intellectual," but lawyer? How would I ever make friends when the image I was projecting bore no relation to my former (working, thinking, real world-inhabiting) self? In shifting my focus from creating to procreating, had I lost my identity?
For all its potential to build communities, real and virtual, the Internet is an awkward place to get to know flesh-and-blood people. How do you make small talk with a fellow parent you’ve just met when you already know the consistency of her son’s bowel movements; have read his birth story; have revealed to her that your right breast is squirtier than your left? Is it healthy to learn all these things about each other before learning each other’s real names?
I continued to offer opinions and occasional advice to the other parents on my local forum, but I started to feel nervous about how much I had revealed about myself. I changed my screen name so it no longer matched my real name; I removed my children’s names from my signature; I hid my e-mail address. I sought solutions to my own parenting quandaries elsewhere. Not from friends and family, but from a search engine.
I found another forum, a very popular one, supporting “natural family living.” It seemed like a good place to hang out, way Left of Center gal that I am, but after a few evenings spent poking around there, Dead Center started to look pretty good.
For all the natural living espoused on the site, it seemed rather unnatural to me. The many and various brightly-colored cartoon figures inserted into members’ posts looked cute and fun, but for people who believed in gentle discipline and non-violent communication, these emoticons sure were doing a lot of head-shaking, finger-wagging, and exploding with rage. And then there were the signature lines: row after row of icons—some dancing, some bouncing, some hanging up diapers, but many, many of them holding up banners: baby-wearing, home-schooling, home- birthing, no-vaccination and no-circumcision.
Though there were obviously a lot of smart women involved, addressing important issues, I didn’t join. I couldn’t bear the thought of creating a profile that listed all of my beliefs in neat little symbols. My son has spent most of every night since birth in our bed, but I don’t use the word “co-sleep.” I nurse him whenever, wherever he wants, and will until he decides he doesn’t want to anymore, but I don’t call myself a “lactivist.” I think my kids are turning out to be unusually bright in many ways, but I cringe when I hear someone refer to a child as “gifted.” This was not the place for me.
What really turned me off was the judgmental tone of some of the posts I read. Over and over, I saw threads asking, “Could you be friends with someone who …” With someone who “poisons” her children (with vaccines, Elmo, Kraft Easy Mac)? With someone who chooses not to breastfeed? With someone who buys plastic toys? Or—the kicker—would you disown your grown children for circumcising their sons? It was like a wacky interactive game show: Where Do You Stand? I am here; you are there. If we don’t agree, there can be no bridge between us. Even the calmer posters often adopted a pitying stance towards the “unnatural” parents out there. So many unenlightened moms to feel sorry for, so little time to teach them.
I yearned for friends with faces, voices, arms, legs: flesh friends with living rooms and coffee cups. If I was going to wander into the messy topics of family life, I was going to do it with people I had at least a chance of hanging out with some day. On those days when I feel like the worst mother on the planet, I need hugs, not ((((HUGS)))). I returned to my local forum, furiously pointing and clicking, hoping that our little group could weave the threads of our collective conversation into something worthwhile in the real world.
At a forum-organized book group meeting, we discussed John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. Krakauer’s book explores Mormon fundamentalism and its connection to violence, to one very grisly double-murder in particular. Reading it, I was struck by parallels to life in the e-world. I realized that we were all in danger of becoming parenting fundamentalists.
Over and over again, in various online parenting groups and in real-life encounters with parents of young children, I saw the hallmarks of fundamentalist communities: a desire to return to one’s roots and to get back to the “natural” way of doing things; a mistrust of science, government, mainstream society; a sense of feeling persecuted; intolerance of differing viewpoints; fear of outside influences.
When does a community become a cult? I wondered. In online discussion groups , we too easily become bumper-sticker versions of ourselves. We start out looking for kinship and commonality but risk becoming isolated in our own public thought bubbles.
The more time I spent online trying to figure out how to become a better parent, the less confident I became in my parenting skills. It might just have been an unhappy coincidence. I was, after all, dealing with a toddler making a very difficult adjustment to having a baby brother and an infant who loved to nurse all night, every night. I staggered through much of this as a de-facto single parent while my husband zipped from coast to coast. It was not the easiest time in any of our lives. But my computer kept luring me back. Surely, I thought, the answers must be in there somewhere.
Late one night an image came to me: my childhood pet, Snowy the cat, a few months before she died. We had gotten Snowy as a kitten when I was in kindergarten, and she lived to be almost twenty. She was a gorgeous white cat but strange in many ways. She had a harsh, nasal meow, not at all the melodious voice one would expect from such a beauty, and an odd habit of lifting a rear paw and pounding it against the wall rapidly, like a rabbit. In her last year—thin, frail, shabby-coated—she developed another quirk. She would crouch behind the toilet and meow plaintively, repeatedly. I couldn’t figure out why she was doing it until one day, when I came up from behind to give her a pat, she startled and jumped as I touched her. I realized she hadn’t heard me coming because she had gone deaf. In my mother’s carpeted, curtained house, the space behind the toilet, in the tiled bathroom, was the only place in the house she could hear her own voice bouncing back at her.
That’s the vision I had of myself, online. I typed away, sending my messages out, and listened for the sound of my own voice. I thought the words. I typed the words. I saw the words. Like Snowy crouching behind the toilet, I proclaimed, “I exist. I exist. I exist.” This was not who I wanted to be.
Winter was lonely and difficult. Activities were few and far between and hard to fit into our erratic sleep patterns. The events I did manage to get to often found me staring placidly into space while my son and daughter fought for my lap. None of us felt up to interacting with new people. Inevitably such outings resulted in another round of sniffles, coughs, sleepless nights. It hardly seemed worth the effort to drive for half an hour just to be ignored by a room full of chattering moms and sippy cup–stealing babies.
But then the calendar turned. The days brightened and, gradually, so did my outlook. I realized I had been putting too much pressure on every playground encounter to lead to a true mom-love match. As much as I joked that making friends with other moms was like dating, socializing with the toddler set wasn’t really the same as looking for Mr. Right. I wasn’t looking for The One; I was looking for many. If it takes a village to raise a child, then we shouldn’t be too fussy about our fellow villagers’ politics, or their diets, or the contents of their Netflix queues. It was time to put away my mental checklist of What Makes a Cool Mom and just try to get to know some people.
As I cruise through my fourth year of motherhood, I am finally starting to relax, on the Net and in my skin. I still check the Web forum too often, glancing at every single post to make sure I don’t miss any fun gatherings or useful information (or the chance to rubberneck at an awkward online collision). There is no doubt I have wasted some serious time in this mommy netherworld. Regardless, I think I have gained more than I have lost.
In recent months I’ve become much more comfortable making the mom/baby scene, and my kids have scads of new playmates. Thanks to the forum, we can find something to do almost every day. It has helped me immeasurably in my fight against the potentially crippling loneliness of new motherhood and the fish-out-of-water shock of moving to a small town. I’m trying to meet as many forum members as possible, to put faces to screen names. In this way, I‘m beginning to piece together my living, breathing, bricks-and-mortar community. It’s elusive, but I know it’s out there.}
I have been aided in this effort by a new outlook—a shift in my focus. Instead of concentrating on the never-ending Q&A of motherhood (pre-fold or fitted cloth diapers? locally- or organically-grown produce? paper or plastic?), I now post as if I’m chatting with friends at a café. My grammar and punctuation have suffered, but I think a more accurate picture of my personality has emerged: opinionated, irreverent, neurotic, frazzled. I am trying to be less formal, to relax my lawyerly prose. I have even let slip with the occasional IMO (in my opinion) or OMG (oh my God), though I still have yet to LOL. I am quite certain I will never ROTFLMAO (if you have to ask, trust me, you don't want to know).
I am trying to focus on the spirit of the group, and the voices of the individuals in it, instead of the sound of my own voice meowing behind the toilet. I am trying to use the forum primarily as a launching pad for real-world interaction and activity, not as a destination in itself. So far, it’s working pretty well. As I have let my real voice seep into my posts, my personal message inbox has filled up with notes from like-minded people—people who, it turns out, have faces, living rooms and coffee cups: friends.
Thanks to the forum, I have found the nursery school of my daughter’s and my dreams, run by a forum member out of her home. I have found a partner for my son’s semi-private swim lessons. I have found playgroups and hiking groups. I have found all of this through an odd online assemblage of one thousand-plus moms and dads, most of whom I have yet to meet in real life, whose unhesitating willingness to help strangers in need—of advice, comfort, childcare, recipes, prayers—has startled and touched me. But my biggest find of all has been a small group of women like me—mid-to-late thirties, open-minded, big-hearted, fun-loving and occasionally foul-mouthed—whom I might never have met had I not lived in the digital age.
I need them. More than anything—more than cookie swaps or kid-friendly concerts or homeopathic remedies—I need friends. We don’t have to agree on everything, or anything. They aren’t raising my kids and I’m not raising theirs. When I remember this, the differences don’t seem to matter. Collectively, these people help keep me going when I don’t think I can do it anymore. I don’t care if their kids watch Noggin or nothing; eat tater tots or tomatillos; play with Bratz Babyz or Waldorf woolens. Even if we aren’t all in exactly the same boat, we are in remarkably similar itty bitty life rafts. We are all adrift, but, in our anxious flotilla, at least we are not alone.
One of my favorite things about doing theater was always the quick rapport that would form among the actors. By the second or third day of rehearsal we would all be comfortable around each other. Warmth and humor flowed easily as everyone relaxed, physically and emotionally, into the work at hand. That sense of ease and purpose in social situations was totally missing from my life as a stay-at-home mom. At the playgrounds I frequented, moms mostly talked about their children and the weather. Everyone seemed guarded, including me. Without the built-in social networks of work or school, I had no clue how to make friends. I felt like I had lost the key to opening up real conversations. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without the Internet. It led me back into the world and lifted the veil of motherhood from the faces of the women in my community.
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